Opinion
Column

Christmas 2012 is already a receding memory. Was this annual, colossal, commercialized social convulsion worth all the enormous expense and emotional strain that has just whirled and torn its path through our midst?

Will true peace and love blossom as never before in its wake, or will all the talking, singing and praying about harmony be once again swallowed up by the same old killing, oppression and injustice? Sadly, for nearly 2,000 years this has been the fatal pattern. As the poet reminds us, two millennia have brought us nearer to the dust of destruction, but no nearer to God.

A fundamental reason for this failure is the continued determination to take the essentially spiritual message of a glorious and universal myth and destroy its deep meaning and relevance by making it into a historicized tale. Christmas has been for centuries now the oldest story ever sold — restricted to the birth of one baby in a far-off Roman province long ago, instead of being seen as the eternal mythos about the birth of the Christ in the heart of every baby ever born.

Other cultures and religions phrase it differently, but the same truth runs through them all. Myth alone can convey this sublime truth. There is a spark of the Divine in each of us.

Any full understanding of ancient religions, and hence of their modern successors, realizes there is one basic reality underlying all else.

That was the belief there is a deep, abiding relationship between humanity and the cosmos itself. Hence, the old saying, “As above, so below.” The individual was understood as a microcosm of the whole; this is why, mythologically, there was thought to be a vast cosmic man stretched out across the sky. Various heavenly bodies were aspects of this “heavenly anthropos.” This kind of thinking lies behind Plato’s Timaeus, for example, and the earliest theology of the Hindu Vedas and other early cosmological accounts.

In 2004 in The Pagan Christ, I showed how the Jesus story had been already told in Egypt centuries earlier. Freud already had said in his book on Moses the Bible was in many ways a “plagiarism” from Egyptian theology.

The Egyptologist Jan Assmann of Heidelberg in the book Religions of the Ancient World (2004) wrote almost everything the Bible has to say about morality and justice “is inherited from its Near Eastern and Egyptian neighbours.”

Recently, three new books came by a leading Sanskrit scholar, Alexander Jacob, an authority on ancient Indo-European faiths. Together, these works take the case much further. In his summary volume, The Origins of Indo-European Religion, Jacob says: “As for the Christian cult, the fact that it too was derived from Indo-European cosmogonical notions and dates back ... to the time of the Babylonian Exile (around 600 BCE) is clear from the extraordinary story of the death and resurrection of the Christ himself, since this can only be a historicization of the descent of the solar force (Osiris) into the underworld and its emergence as the sun (Horus) of our solar system.” He goes on to speak of the “cosmological myth of Jesus,” which has deliberately been changed into a “historical tale” set in Roman times in Judea.

Importantly, myth is not fairy tale. It conveys truths that are timeless. To quote Joseph Campbell, “It’s about what never was, but always is.” So the Christ story is true, but at a depth and in a universality beyond the traditional Christmas telling.

Understood anew like that, it would indeed “give peace a chance” today and throughout the coming years.

— Tom Harpur is a bestselling author on spiritual and ethical issues. www.tomharpur.com